Tag: media

Punch harder

It’s amusing how many SJWs don’t understand how this “Internet” thing works. A woman whines about being criticized by Dalrock, among others.

A group of supposed “Christian” men bantered back and forth under a blog written with the sole intention of saying that women divorce so they can profit off of it by writing about it and I Laura Lifshitz, am one of the most evil women profiting off her dissolved marriage. Oh and by the way, the article is categorized under “ugly feminists.”

First, the comments focused on how terrible I was for writing about my divorce not only for The Huffington Post, but also for the New York Times because you know, the divorce must be my fault since I write about the experience, and I’m an evil Jewish feminist. And not only must the divorce be my fault but that I am a selfish mother who cares not for her own child and how she feels in the matter. In addition, let’s not forget to add that female writers writing about divorce are a bunch of leeches set to destroy our families all in the name of money.

Because, you know, I’m just filthy rich. It’s too bad my student loan lender doesn’t realize this.

Then, the commenters started to focus on my last name: Lifshitz.

“Ha, Ha, Ha! Is it even a real name?” joked one commenter.

Then the other commenters joined in to bash my last name, these anti-Semitic, vile, and immature babies (I mean men).

Now why would anyone be moved to criticize a woman who calls them “anti-Semitic, vile, and immature babies”? What is the bright line that separates a woman calling men “vile and immature babies” and a man calling women “rancid cunts”? And for crying out loud, look at her name. “Is it a real name” is about the mildest possible sport anyone could make of it. As for people getting personal about Ms Lipshits, it’s not hard to see why they might feel justified in doing so:

There is this one dude at the gym who is very buff. He’s not my bag of treats, but apparently he feels that any woman who looks in his direction must be interested. He has this stone face grimace. I see him at least three times a week. Smile you grouchy fuck! I am not interested in you, but I just hate looking at such a crabby face.

Any woman who writes like this has made herself entirely fair game for any verbal abuse anyone wants to pour out upon her. Like the McRapeys and McRacists of the world, she wants to be able to dish out abuse without being subjecting to it in return. Women like this are in shock that men on the Internet aren’t treating them the way that men in their daily life do, and that they can’t get away with talking about others in public the way they do in private.

The thing is, if you’re going to be a public figure and express your opinion on the Internet, you are going to upset a subset of the people who encounter it. A subset of that subset are going to respond by attacking you using nothing but rhetoric. I’ve had people calling me nearly every name in the book on the Internet since 2001. So what? It clearly hasn’t harmed me in the slightest. I quite like that it also gives me complete carte blanche to call everyone else anything I please since it seems to bother most of them considerably more than it bothers me.

The first rule of dealing with SJWs is Andrew Breitbart’s: always punch back twice as hard. The second rule is this: keep punching. Women are particularly susceptible to attacks on their appearance and their sexual behavior, so those are the most effective subjects to target with rhetoric. Once it is clear that they’re not engaging in honest dialectic or rational discourse, your best bet is to either ignore them or nuke them rhetorically.

The third rule is this: quote them and quote them ruthlessly.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a self-admitted racist. John Scalzi is a
self-admitted rapist. NK Jemisin is a self-admitted savage… and proud
of it.

The SJWs have to choose. Either they can engage in rational discourse or they can accept being called sluts and savages and racists and evil, ugly feminists on a regular basis. What is not on the table is one-way communication where they attack and lecture us and we humbly accept it in dutiful silence.

There are some things I cannot understand — like internet trolls and
people who hate chocolate — but there is one thing that I do know is
that I will never stop writing. I don’t care if they come to my house
and call me the ugliest cunt on the planet. I will never stop writing my
story.

Oh, I don’t think there was every any chance that Ms Lipshits was going to stop talking about herself. But she can be assured that as long as she subjects the public to her story, the public is going to talk back.

Depression or Sudden Jihad Syndrome?

Contradictory claims are being made about the murderous Germanwings pilot. The more explosive one is that the “significant item” that was found at his apartment was indicative of a conversion to Islam:

According to Michael Mannheimer, a writer for German PI-News, Germany now has its own 9/11, thanks to the convert to Islam, Andreas Lubitz. Translation from German:

All evidence indicates that the copilot of Airbus machine in his six-months break during his training as a pilot in Germanwings, converted to Islam and subsequently either by the order of “radical”, ie. devout Muslims , or received the order from the book of terror, the Quran, on his own accord decided to carry out this mass murder. As a radical mosque in Bremen is in the center of the investigation, in which the convert was staying often, it can be assumed that he – as Mohammed Atta, in the attack against New York – received his instructions directly from the immediate vicinity of the mosque.

Converts are the most important weapon of Islam. Because their resume do not suggests that they often are particularly violent Muslims. Thus Germany now has its own 9/11, but in a reduced form. And so it is clear that Islam is a terrorist organization that are in accordance with §129a of the Criminal Code to prohibit it and to investigate its followers. But nothing will happen. One can bet that the apologists (media, politics, “Islamic Scholars”) will agree to assign this an act of a “mentally unstable” man, and you can bet that now, once again the mantra of how supposedly peaceful Islam is will continue.

Now this sounds a little far-fetched and breathless to me, especially since there were only reports of the pilot breathing, not of any prayers or the customary jihadist battle cry. I’d take it with a grain of salt at the moment. Then again, I’m not sure that any direct statements that the pilot said nothing of any kind have been made. And it is true that claims of his mental instability are already being reported, such as here:

The Germanwings co-pilot who crashed his plane into a mountain killing himself and 149 people on board was receiving psychiatric counselling right up until the crash, it emerged today.

Andreas Lubitz locked the pilot out the of the Airbus A320’s cockpit before setting the plane’s controls to descend into a rocky valley, French prosecutors revealed yesterday.

As well as having been signed off from training with depression in 2008, it was reported this morning that Lubitz had continued to receive mental health support up until this week’s crash.

German newspaper Bild also reported that the 28-year-old was in the middle of the ‘relationship crisis’ with his girlfriend in the weeks before the crash and may have been struggling to cope with a break-up.

It was claimed this morning that the couple were engaged to be married next year.

New information about Lubitz’s life emerged just hours after police investigating the disaster began a four-hour search of his flat, which he is said to have shared with a girlfriend. Officers refused to reveal details of what they have found but have insisted no suicide note had been recovered.

The two things that are slightly strange here are a) the refusal to reveal any details of what has been found, except the statement that something was “significant”. Of course, that could be anything from a Koran to the dead body of his ex-girlfriend. The other thing that is strange is that in all the previous reports, there was no indication of a girlfriend of any kind. For example, he was reported to have taken a trip to a resort with a male friend, the sort of trip I have never known any man to take except with a wife or girlfriend.

And, of course, given the growing strength of PEGIDA, we know the German authorities will be desperate to keep any indication of Lubitz being a Mahometan convert under wraps.

SJWs take a scalp

The British SJWs at the BBC finally managed to bring down Jeremy Clarkson:

The BBC bosses have always been partisans of whatever ideology was the most elitist, the most sanctimonious, the most anti-public, in any given age: in the 60s and 70s it was full of communists, today it is full of Politically-correct Progressives. They are almost always Leftist, always Collectivist, and almost always humorless.

And the BBC’s mid-level bureaucrats have always, always hated Top Gear. The current BBC’s manager, Danny Cohen, had been very vocal about how desperate he was to get rid of Jeremy Clarkson, and now he got his wish. In the process, it made a pretty startling revelation as to how Collectivists work, and who they serve.

When it was announced that the BBC was using a dinnertime argument as an excuse to fire (or “sack” as they say across the pond) the driving force behind Top Gear, two big petitions were being promoted across the social media almost instantly. The first was in support of Clarkson, demanding that the BBC not fire him; it ended up with over a million signatures and became the fastest-growing petition in the history of change.org. The second demanded that Clarkson be fired for his various crimes against humanity (which mostly consisted of being anti-Europe, anti-Left, anti-nanny-state, and anti-political-correctness). This petition garnered a whopping 34127 signatures. It featured, in brazen shamelessness, a completely un-ironic picture of Clarkson with his mouth gagged on it, making it very clear what these people wanted: to totally silence those who disagree with them.

This is an interesting result for two reasons. First, it gives us a very good, albeit non-scientific, look at just what the divide between the Collectivist elitists and the Individualists is: the Collectivist-Crowd made up about 3.2% of the population who signed either petition. These are the people who are strident in their advocacy of the Collectivist values of the modern “progressive” Left, that believe in pogroms against free speech; but more importantly, that will despise anything just because everyday people like it too much.

Clarkson’s case is actually quite similar to mine with the SFWA, despite the fact that considerably more people care about the former than the latter. When the SJWs are gunning for you, they will immediately grasp at any excuse, no matter how trivial, to at least try to get rid of you. It’s something you must always keep in mind once you understand that you’re being targeted by these vicious, spiteful little people. They can’t handle power and they’re control freaks, so perspective means nothing whatsoever to them.

So, don’t think that they won’t, and if you’re at all interested in keeping your position, you must avoid handing them the ammunition they are so avidly seeking. Of course, if you don’t give a damn, then don’t worry about it, accept the inevitable when it comes, draw the process out as long as you can, and thereby permit the world to clearly see exactly what sort of lunatics they are.

Interview with Vox Day

Sam Roberts at Reaxxion interviewed me about the game industry, the SJW attack on it, and our upcoming plans for First Sword:

SR: Many commentators, at our site and elsewhere, have noticed the sudden outbreak of prudishness in the gaming industry. We saw this with PAX and its ban on booth babes, even to the point of specifying a minimum length for girl’s skirts. Even Mortal Kombat, the franchise that established itself in the 1990’s through its willingness to break all the rules, is moving to “more realistic” characters with smaller breasts and thicker waists. What do you think has changed in the gaming industry in the past 20 years that’s made it so much less able to resist moral scolds?

VD: The most important change is that game development no longer belongs to the mavericks. When we started Fenris Wolf in 1993, literally everyone thought we were crazy. We were throwing away good jobs and wasting our educations to do what people considered to be the equivalent of playing with digital Lincoln Logs. Now that games are widely understood to be big business, many of the jobs pay decent salaries, and you can get degrees in “game development” and “game design,” you have considerably more risk-intolerant, conflict-avoidant people entering the industry.

Twenty years ago, the average developer would have laughed his ass off at the idea that he should design or develop anything other than whatever the hell he wanted to do. These days, there are a fair number of bed-wetters in game development who are terrified at the idea that someone, somewhere, might take offense at something in one of their games. And then, of course, you’ve also got SJWs trying to stick their noses into the industry in order to change it, just as they did in comics and science fiction & fantasy fiction.

You’ll definitely want to check out the screenshots of the 3DV engine in action. Be sure to click on the image of the High Elven archers. 3DV is visually spectacular and is intended to do for miniature gaming what VASSAL did for board-and-counter games. In addition to various other topics addressed, you can also see our response to the SJW demands for more women in games, beginning with the introduction to Morwyn Shadowsong, a female elf gladiator who is the face of First Sword, the fantasy gladiator miniatures game.

It probably won’t take a genius to put two and two together and realize that the Tactical Uncertainty model I’m developing, which has been discussed in some detail over at Castalia, is intended for the third edition of Striker that Marc Miller has asked me to develop. The rules will be developed for use in 3DV and on the tabletop alike; the challenge is how to make something that works almost automatically in the former can be translated to the latter. With regards to some of the other games mentioned, we will have some exciting new announcements soon.

Wearing Murdoch’s leash

Fox News may be better than the ABCNNBCBS cabal, but don’t ever mistake them for the good guys, or even being reliably pro-American. And they do NOT like criticism coming from the nationalist right:

The blogger Mickey Kaus has quit his job at The Daily Caller after the conservative site’s editor-in-chief, Tucker Carlson, pulled a critical column about Fox News from the site, Kaus told the On Media blog on Tuesday.

“It’s pretty simple,” Kaus said in an interview, “I wrote a piece attacking Fox for not being the opposition on immigration and amnesty — for filling up the airwaves with reports on ISIS and terrorism, and not fulfilling their responsibility of being the opposition on amnesty and immigration…. I posted it at 6:30 in the morning. When I got up, Tucker had taken it down. He said, ‘We can’t trash Fox on the site. I work there.'”

Carlson, who co-founded The Daily Caller in 2010, is a conservative contributor to Fox News and the host of its weekend edition of “Fox & Friends.”

Kaus says when he told Carlson he needed to be able to write about Fox, Carlson told him it was a hard-and-fast rule, and non-negotiable.

“He said it was a rule, and he wouldn’t be able to change that rule. So I told him I quit,” Kaus explained. “I just don’t see how you can put out a publication with that kind of giant no-go area. It’s not like we’re owned by Joe’s Muffler Shop, so we just can’t write about Joe’s Muffler shop.”

This is entirely par for the Fox News course. Ten years ago I was writing a book called Media Whores that was signed to Thomas Nelson. The executives were very upset when they discovered that it wasn’t only about the media whores of the Left, but contained chapters about Michelle Malkin and Bill O’Reilly as well.

The official line about the sudden cancellation was that the book wasn’t expected to sell well enough to justify the marketing. However, I was told by someone inside the organization, who was definitely in a position to know what really happened, that the outline and sample chapters I’d provided were shown to Fox, who indicated that they would prefer that it was not published. So, the book was duly canceled six weeks after the contract was signed, although I did get paid for it.

This was not my only experience of this variety. And perhaps you’ll understand that my disregard for mainstream publishers is not entirely rooted in my disdain for the SJW gatekeepers in SF/F.

Interview with a legend

Johnny Wilson, the former editor-in-chief of Computer Gaming World, is one of my all-time favorite people in the game industry and one of the individuals I most respect on the planet. He’s written one very good book with Rusel DeMaria on the history of the industry, and I’m hoping to get another one out of him for Castalia House.

Like a lot of the old school game industry people, Johnny is more than a one-trick pony; in addition to being a professor at DePaul University, he’s also a theologian and a pastor. The whole Gamasutra interview from 2012 is fascinating, but in light of #GamerGate, I found these two answers to be particularly prescient.

Was there any moment that made you realize game journalism had finally reached the main stream?

Considering the shoddy state of mainstream journalism today (even some once-great newspapers are pure sell-outs), I guess we reached that bottom rung level a long time ago. I know that when I was editor, I had definite ideals of serving the reader, avoiding conflict-of-interest, and getting behind the corporate facades and into the real stories. The truth is that I don’t know of any modern publications—analog or digital—that have those ideals.

Do you think game reviews with percentages and stars somehow cheapened game journalism?

No, I think the desire to get the “first” coverage cheapened game journalism. In the pen and paper world, we used to talk about “shrink-wrap” reviews. I know that some of the early pioneers in the hobby game magazines would talk about popping the shrink-wrap, looking at the components, reading the rules, and writing the review without even pushing pieces around. My feeling was that European publications, because they had a more competitive environment (and efficient distribution system), rushed reviews to press. That doesn’t really serve the reader at all.

My argument with, for example, PC Gamer’s percentage system wasn’t that they used percentages, it was that an astute reader would notice that the magazine (at least, during the Gary Witta era) always had some sacrificial lamb of a product that they rated in low percentage ratings. But, if you looked at those games, a lot of them were never released in the U.S. and certainly weren’t advertisers in that publication. At CGW, we didn’t have enough editorial space to deal with games that weren’t going to be released in the U.S. So, we wouldn’t even have touched those games. On the other hand, there were times that lousy games we might have been tempted to ignore were actually advertised in our publication. If they were advertised, I felt an obligation to review them. And I had more than one advertiser yell at me that I shouldn’t treat them that way after what they had spent. I shrugged my shoulders on one occasion and said, “Ironically, I probably wouldn’t even have assigned the review if you weren’t trying to get my readers’ attention.”

But, did our star ratings cheapen our review work? No. If anything, the stars sharpened our efforts. The reviewers suggested a number of stars and the editor covering that genre was expected to defend that star rating in the general editorial [OK, “Star Chamber”] meeting where we debated the ratings. The meeting often required a half-day or more of heated discussions before we approved those reviews to go to press. We didn’t discuss the reviews among ourselves as much before the star ratings were implemented. To be honest, I resisted the star ratings for as long as possible. I wanted the readers to READ the reviews. But, the bottom line is that I just kept getting hammered by readers that we NEVER gave bad reviews when I thought it was clear that we gave bad reviews. I eventually realized that our readership was becoming younger and more casual and, as a result, we had to spell out what we really thought.

The world wide web was the death of game journalism. There simply isn’t any reliable metric to determine which site is really reliable and which journalists are legitimately trying to do their work and which are merely “fan boys” getting their dopamine fix by slamming people and using “tabloid” style headlines. It always makes me nervous when I read reviews on the web because I don’t feel like I can trust anyone to have played the game all the way through.

Go read the reviews from the older CGW issues sometime. The difference between the level of expertise and the depth of knowledge possessed by the writers then versus the writers of today is astonishing. The dirty little secret of the SJWs in game journalism today is that they don’t actually know very much about games, which is why they always lean towards using their nominal game reviews and articles as a platform for non-gaming issues.

I wrote for both Electronic Entertainment and Computer Gaming World, and writing for the latter was always rigorous. Chris Lombardi not only sent my first review back to me for re-writing, but rejected an article on games as the realization of the Wagnerian concept of Total Art that later appeared in a BenBella SmartPop book. The most notable thing CGW had that most modern game sites lack was integrity.

No male space goes unmolested

However, I suspect this is less about a commitment to women in technology than a cynical, Sarkeesian-style opportunistic grab for cash:

Talk about a cool dude: he once stopped a sulfuric acid leak with a piece of chocolate, and dismantled a missile using a paper clip. The 1980s US television character, secret agent Angus MacGyver, could do it all. And in 2016 his successor will be a woman, if a US engineering association has its way.

Late last month, the National Academy of Engineering launched what it called “The Next MacGyver Project,” aimed at coming up with ideas for a scripted TV series featuring a female engineer as the leading character.

Thirty years after that cult series riveted TV viewers, “the objective here is not a MacGyver reboot, but to inspire a new generation of young women interested in science and technology by creating a strong female role model,” said Lee Zlotoff, creator of MacGyver.

The project is joint initiative by Adam Smith, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, and Randy Atkins, head of communications at the National Academy of Engineering.

“After an interview with Lee Zlotoff, Adam called me and proposed that we develop a TV show, and I immediately said yes,” said Atkins.

The name — “The Next MacGyver Project” — was suggested by Zlotoff, who has supported the project from the outset.

“I cannot say how many people told me they got interested in engineering after watching MacGyver,” said Atkins. “The idea to make a female lead character comes from Hollywood producers we met during the initial phase of the project,” Atkins said.

Yes, I imagine the idea for branding it “MacGyver” would have come from Mr. Zlotoff. I’m certain his commitment to inspire a new generation of women interested in science and technology – all six of them – by creating a strong female role model has nothing to do with the fact that he hasn’t had a hit television show since MacGyver.

It’s not enough for The Next MacGyver to be a woman. She should be a
black Jewish bisexual with Down’s Syndrome in a wheelchair. Actually, that would probably be a hell of a lot more entertaining than the usual grrrl power nonsense. Done right, it would be downright hilarious. Especially if she couldn’t really talk, but sort of made these moaning Chewbacca sounds that everyone could understand perfectly.

That, I would watch. And as long as she saved the day by turning her wheelchair into a nuclear reactor or whatever, it would be perfectly inspirational and millions of young girls would be inspired to continue avoiding science and technology like the plague.

Smells like disruption

Google appears interested in presenting an opportunity to competitors:

The trustworthiness of a web page might help it rise up Google’s rankings if the search giant starts to measure quality by facts, not just links. THE internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free “news” stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness.

Google’s search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. “A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,” says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

Considering what we’ve learned about a) the lies committed by corrupt scientific researchers, b) the inferiority and corruption of the U.S. educational system, and c) the proclivity for complete fiction on the part of the U.S. news media, it’s not difficult to predict that this will be a complete debacle if Google is foolish enough to implement it. If I were a competitor to Google search, I would be on my knees praying that they would follow through on this concept in the most extreme manner possible.

You know this is most likely an SJW-driven affair, because only SJWs would be dumb enough to risk a corporation’s entire business model in the interests of their ideology. If this is simply a genuine attempt to improve their offerings, Google will introduce it as an option for those interested in it and it will either succeed or fail on the merits of the implementation. If it is an SJW attempt to drive the narrative, it will be imposed as a replacement for the link-based system and people will rapidly turn to competitors who don’t seek to impose their reality on the masses.

I tend to doubt that the ABCNNBCBS cabal will be buried deep within the “truth-based” links due to their near-complete disassociation with observable reality. But you never know. Perhaps this is Google’s stealth means of taking on the mainstream media indirectly.

#GamerGate: the last redoubt

Nero has some important observations that those in other communities attacked by the SJW Left should take to heart:

In all of the distracting, hysterical, evidence-free and unfair allegations of misogyny and bigotry hurled at supporters of GamerGate, the consumer revolt that continues to surface outrageous misconduct in the video games press, something is being forgotten.

GamerGate is remarkable—and attracts the interest of people like me—because it represents perhaps the first time in the last decade or more that a significant incursion has been made in the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators.

Industry after industry has toppled over, putting up no more of a fight than, say, France in 1940. Publishing, journalism, TV… all lie supine beneath the crowing, cackling, censorious battle-axes, male and female, of the third-wave feminist and social justice causes.

But not gamers. Lovers of video games, on seeing their colleagues unfairly hounded as misogynists, on watching journalists credulously reporting scandalous sexual assault claims just because a person was perceived to be “right-wing” and on seeing the games they love attacked and their very identities denied and ridiculed, have said: no. This will not stand.

The key, as he points out is here: “Because hard-core gaming is overwhelmingly male—don’t
believe cherry-picked statistics that tell you women now make up 50 per
cent of gamers; they don’t, in any meaningful sense—and
because those men are often of a stubborn, obsessive, hyper-competitive
and systematic bent, it has produced an army finally capable of
launching offensives against the censors—using the censors’ own tactics, such as advertiser boycotts, against them.”

Keep in mind the Four Fs of Victory. Fight, Follow, or get the F— out of the way. And if you’re a concern moderate who has “concerns” or is “worried” or thinks one tactic or another might be “counterproductive”, shut the F— up. 


As history clearly shows, you’re the one who is counterproductive.

Speak until they silence themselves

Please don’t hit them, the Washington Post begs. After all, they are just little girls.

Jessica Valenti is one of the most successful and visible feminists of her generation. As a columnist for the Guardian, her face regularly appears on the site’s front page. She has written five books, one of which was adapted into a documentary, since founding the blog Feministing.com. She gives speeches all over the country. And she tells me that, because of the nonstop harassment that feminist writers face online, if she could start over, she might prefer to be completely anonymous. “I don’t know that I would do it under my real name,” she says she tells young women who are interested in writing about feminism. It’s “not just the physical safety concerns but the emotional ramifications” of constant, round-the-clock abuse….

Once a woman is singled out by a men’s rights group such as A Voice for Men, the misogynist Reddit forum The Red Pill or even just a right-wing Twitter account like Twitchy, she is deluged with hatred. The barrage, in addition to scaring its target, serves as a warning to onlookers. Jill Filipovic, a senior political writer covering feminist issues at Cosmopolitan, says she recently tried to persuade a friend to run for office. “There’s several reasons why I wouldn’t want to do it, but one of them is that I follow you on Twitter, and I see what people say to you. I could never deal with that,” the friend told her.

Many people can’t. Last year, abortion rights activist Lauren Rankin pulled back from writing online and, for the most part, from Twitter because the threats and insults were becoming so wearying. She continues to serve on the board of the reproductive rights nonprofit A Is For and faces off against antiabortion protesters as a volunteer clinic escort, but she no longer engages publicly. “I don’t like the idea that it seems like I was scared or intimidated away from the Internet,” she says. “But I think I’ve recentered why I do what I do, in ways that I can maintain my mental sanity. Unfortunately, that really doesn’t involve the Internet as much.”

Filipovic, the former editor of the blog Feministe, says that, although her skin has thickened over the years, the daily need to brace against the online onslaught has changed her. “I doubt myself a lot more. You read enough times that you’re a terrible person and an idiot, and it’s very hard not to start believing that maybe they see something that you don’t.” She also finds it harder to let her guard down. “I have not figured out how to spend all day steeling against criticism — not just criticism, but really awful things people say to you and about you — and then go home and 30 minutes later you’re an emotionally available, normal person.”

Meanwhile, the creator of Feministe, Lauren Bruce, no longer has an online presence at all. “I had to completely cut that part off in order to live the rest of my life,” she says. “In order to work, have a nice family and feel like I was emotionally whole, I could not have one foot planted in a toxic stew.”

#GamerGate has them on the run. They can’t take the heat. What they call “harassment” and “abuse” is seldom anything more than free speech answering free speech. They have a right to speak their piece, and we have a right to speak right back. We have a right to speak back with all of the contempt, disdain, and loathing that we feel for their insane and societally suicidal ideas.

Open up your hate and let it pour over them. Don’t think for even one nanosecond that they don’t deserve it every bit of the criticism, of the contempt, of the disdainful dismissal that overwhelms them. They are trying to destroy Western civilization. They are trying to destroy marriage and civil society. They are advocates of child murder. They are advocates of a philosophy that makes National Socialism look merciful and Communism practical and Fascism coherent by comparison. Do not hold back. Speak back twice as hard. Speak back until they fall silent.

Women are particularly susceptible to shame. So shame them relentlessly. Shame those who agree with them. Mock their white knights who rush in to save them. Above all, dignify their views and voices with all the respect you would show to a particularly noxious fart in an elevator.